Another Example of Less Teaching Leading to More Learning

Some of the most fascinating experiments in education occurred in the 1920s and ‘30s, and almost nobody talks about them today. That was an era when progressive ideas about education were in the air. Even public schools were experimenting with the idea that less teaching and more opportunity for self-direction would pay big educational dividends.

Benezet’s experiment on the non-teaching of arithmetic

In a previous post (here) I described an experiment conducted by L. P. Benezet when he was superintendent of schools in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. He altered the curriculum for half of the schoolchildren in the poorest schools in his district, so they would not be taught arithmetic until 6th grade. He found that those children, at the beginning of 6th grade, before they had received any arithmetic instruction at all, performed much better than the others on math story problems—the kinds of problems that require common sense applied to numbers. They were even better on those than were the kids in the rich schools, all of whom had been studying arithmetic all along. Of course, they were behind the others in doing calculations (adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing) set up in the usual school way, but by the end of 6th grade they had fully caught up to the others on that and were still ahead on story problems.

Benezet concluded that the early teaching of arithmetic was not only a waste of everyone’s time, but was counterproductive to the eventual learning of arithmetic. In his words, the early teaching of arithmetic was “chloroforming the children’s minds,” leading them to lose their common sense about anything to do with numbers. Nobody in education talks about Benezet’s experiment these days. Few people in education seem to have even heard of it. Benezet’s results fit well with research showing that school children make greater gains in mathematical reasoning during summer vacation than they do during the school year (see here), which is another finding that nobody in education talks about.

Williams’s experiment in which delinquent boys were freed from being taught

Now here’s yet another bit of education research that nobody today talks about. It was published in 1930 in the academic journal School and Society under the title “An Experiment in Self-Directed Education,” by Herbert Williams, the teacher who carried out the research.

The practical problem Williams was trying to address was what to do about delinquent boys, who were frequently absent from school and were causing trouble in the community. For the sake of this experiment, he went through the Juvenile Court records for the city of population 300,000 and identified the “worst” boys he could find. To that group the school principals added a few more, whom they considered to be their “most serious problems.” He ended up with a group that “ranged in age from eight to nearly sixteen, in IQ from 60 to 120, and included colored, Polish, Hungarians, and native white Americans.”

The experiment was started in January, 1924, and lasted until the beginning of June that year. During that period the boys were excused from regular school classes and, instead, were assigned to a special room created for them in a technical school. The room was equipped with desks, blackboards, a large table, and a collection of books, including storybooks, nonfiction works, and textbooks for the various grades. The boys were given standard academic achievement tests in January and again, four months later, in May.

And now, I know no better way to convey what happened than to quote Williams directly:

“No formal instruction was given. In the beginning of the experiment the children were told to keep busy and refrain from annoying any of the others. This was the only rule that was enforced. Otherwise, they were permitted to occupy themselves as they saw fit. The instructor [Williams] from time to time passed from one to another to see what was being done. One child might be busily occupied in copying a picture from one of the books; another might be reading a fairy story; another occupied with a problem in arithmetic; another reading a history; others might be looking up places on a geography map; and still others would be studying about some machinery.

“Whenever a child was found manifesting an interest in some particular thing, opportunity and encouragement were given him to develop that interest...The child with an interest and aptitude for mechanical work was given an opportunity to do this sort of work in the high-school machine shop. The same was true for those interested in automobile mechanics, woodworking, printing and the like. Arrangements were made for recreation at the neighborhood YMCA…”

“Each child was told of his accomplishments on the achievement test and encouraged to make up for any deficiencies, but he was not forced to devote his time to these. It was a revelation to the writer how these children turned naturally from one subject to another. A boy might spend an entire day on some book that he was reading. The next day he might devote to arithmetic. One 10-year-old became interested in working square root problems and worked all of these he could find in the arithmetic book. A colored boy became interested in history and read all the histories we could supply. His accounts of interesting historical events kept the entire group keenly interested as he related them. Whenever one of the boys found something in his reading which he felt would prove interesting he was permitted to tell it to the group. However, they were not required to pay attention to the speaker if they wanted to continue what they were doing.

“Many of the boys went to the blackboard to work arithmetic problems, primarily for the activity involved. They made up certain games involving arithmetic processes… For example, two or more boys would start at a given signal to add by seventeens to a thousand. The rivalry was often intense, and for some of the boys the increase in speed and accuracy in the fundamentals was striking. The reports of the various boys on interesting material read would stimulate other boys to read the same thing or something of like nature. It is quite possible, too, that the desire to obtain recognition from their fellows motivated them to do tasks that would not have been otherwise attempted.”

“Although a total of twenty-six boys were in attendance in this special experimental group for shorter or longer periods, only thirteen were present for both the January, Form A, and May, Form B, Stanford Achievement Tests. This was due to out-of-school adjustments, transfers and other causes. Social adjustment was given first importance, and completeness of the experimental records was not allowed to prevent placing a boy on a farm, for example, if this met a pressing need.”

Here are the results from the achievement tests:

Over the 4 months period of this experiment, the thirteen children gained an average of slightly over 15 months in language age, 14 months in arithmetic; 11 months in reading; 11 months in science; and 6 months in both history and literature. By the end of the experiment all of these children were above grade level overall. The three boys who showed the least gains were also the three who, for reasons of health or family problems, were most often absent from the group. The average gains for the ten students who were regularly present were 17.4 months for language and arithmetic; 15.8 months for science; and 15.5 months for reading.

In concluding the article, Williams wrote:

“The most striking fact is that such marked improvement could and did result from such informal, self-directed activity. The writer was not greatly interested in the educational development of these boys. The problem of social adjustment entirely outweighed it in his estimation. He used the special room merely to get better acquainted with the individual boys and to keep them from violating the compulsory attendance law. Whether they learned reading, arithmetic, geography, history and the other subjects was considered relatively unimportant…It should be remembered, too, that these boys spent less time in the classroom and more in shops and the gymnasium and on the playground than is usually the case...In accounting for this increase in educational achievement the writer can only surmise that...a personal interest on the part of the supervisor in each child’s home conditions, neighborhood, recreation, health and the like as well as an interest in the child individually may have stimulated the child.”

My own suspicion, not mentioned by Williams, is that age mixing also played a role. The boys ranged in age from 8 to almost 16. Self-directed education always works best in age-mixed environments (see here and here). Also, of course, these boys were free to spend as much time as they liked on whatever they were studying, which allowed them to dig much more deeply than is ever possible in a standard classroom; and because they were always free to talk with one another they learned from one another. While regular classrooms are perfectly designed to prevent the development and pursuit of genuine interests, this “classroom” did not prevent these.

Wouldn’t it be great if education authorities would take a look back at some of these old research studies and try repeating them today? Today education authorities seem to think the only solution to educational deficiency is more teaching—more of the same of what already isn’t working. But research such as Benezet’s and Williams’s suggests that the solution might lie in less teaching and more trust.

Source: Basic Books, with permission

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m not a fan of standardized academic testing, nor of any sort of school system that sees high scores on such tests as a primary educational goal. In my view (and I suspect Williams’s as well), the years that we think of as school years should be devoted to discovering who you are and what you like to do, to developing skills in what you like to do, to acquiring social and emotional competence, and to gaining the confidence that you can learn whatever you want, on your own initiative, at the time you need to know it. That all comes from real Self-Directed Education, where young people are free to explore the world in ways that are not dependent at all on a special room with textbooks, nor on encouragement to improve scores on someone else’s concept of “achievement.” Williams’s experiment is, to me, just one more example showing that the kinds of “achievements” that we fret and sweat about in our schools are actually quite easily and painlessly attained by young people who for one reason or another decide to attain them and are free to do so in the ways that work best for them.

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And now, what do you think about all this? This blog is, among other things, a forum for discussion, and your views and knowledge are valued and taken seriously by me and other readers. Make your thoughts known in the comments section below. As always, I prefer if you post your comments and questions here rather than send them to me by private email. By putting them here, you share with other readers, not just with me. I read all comments and try to respond to all serious questions if I feel I have something useful to add to what others have said.

From what we now know about movement, serotonin uptake, the importance of community to learning, I suspect that the Y membership, the outdoor play and the pressure free friendships had a lot to do with the learning, as well as the non-judgmental relationship with the "not-teachers".

I almost wept with the truth of these forgotten studies. Thank you for bringing them to our attention!

It is painful to think about the hours of boredom and quiet suffering that so many children endure in our outmoded 19th century classrooms.

As a mother of two children who never took a math class or studied math (other than brief dabbles) until ages 14 and 19, I can attest to the fact that early training in math is not necessary. One of my children has graduated summa cum laude from a top university and the other is in a difficult nursing program. Both are perfectly capable of doing any math they need in life. They both have reasonable, common sense math understanding. I also see this all the time at Tallgrass Sudbury School.

As a college math teacher, I can attest to the fact that early training is in fact harmful to many people. I see lots of math phobic adults whose math understanding was clearly damaged by the 10+ years of math instruction they endured. I think about how many long division and adding fraction problems my students did over all those years and they still cannot do them. Yet they are smart, capable people otherwise. It seems pretty obvious the problem is not them - it's the system.

In Norway our students have passed 1200 lessons of mathematics when they come to highschool, and often they know very little mathematics. There must be some basically wrong teaching Methods we are using. Maybe the answer for us is self directed Learning?

I have a wisdom teacher trained in native American traditions that suggest that the age at which we are all in high school is actually the best age to learn to do things and test life directly (often physical, like survival skills for i.e.) and that by doing things (rather than functioning mostly at the conceptual level and collecting data) we create a much better foundation for life and that our intellectual knowledge can catch up later.

On the other hand Tibetan Buddhism has very rigorous intellectual learning during that age bracket ?

In any case many Native American wisdom holders seem to believe that our contemporary cultures worship the mind and fail to consider humans as a whole (their point is that we think we function from all of our human aspects but according to their tradition, the whole educational process is from 1/4 of our humanity, leaving the other 3/4 underdeveloped).

In the movie "Seven Years in Tibet", the Tibetan monks are portrayed as being very controlling and dictatorial toward the young Dalai Lama. Yet some of the interactions between the young Dalai Lama and the foreigner Heinrich Harrer (played by Brad Pitt) constitute the best portrayal of what unschooling looks like in the movies that I know of - as a foreigner you do not give orders to the Dalai Lama!

It is always wonderful to hear about modern-sounding experiments that were conducted almost a century ago!

Having worked as a teacher in a democratic free school for a couple years, I am somewhat surprised by the descriptions of the activities that the children chose to engage in at Benezet's experimental school/classroom. It was very rare that I discovered children working math problems together for the fun of it.

Another quote that surprised me was: "His accounts of interesting historical events kept the entire group keenly interested as he related them."

This level of interest in relatively academic topics makes me think that this experimental school was much closer to a "progressive", adult-led operation than to what I think of as a self-directed school a la Sudbury Valley School.

I assume you mean Williams's experimental classroom, not Benezet's. Benezet's schools were regular public schools that ran just like all public schools of the time; they just didn't teach any arithmetic until 6th grade. Near the end of my essay I point out that this was not what I would think of as the ideal situation for Self-Directed Education, because of the limitations on what was available to them and the suggestion at the beginning that they try to "make up the deficiencies" noted on their achievement tests. Yet it certainly was self-directed, in that there were no requirements about what they do; and Williams is quite clear that he did no teaching or coaxing beyond that first suggestion. Also, even though they could leave their special room for specific interests they had, they apparently were there, together, a lot of the time; and while there there probably wasn't much to do other than read the books available. The group apparently did, for various reasons, get motivated to read some of the books and do some of the problems available in the room. My point, which I think I make clear near the end, is not that this is typical of what happens in real SDE as practiced by unschoolers and democratic schoolers; but it illustrates that, without any teaching or even much if any encouragement, kids--including the "worst boys in the city"--can easily learn the stuff that's tested by achievement tests if they want to. It's just not that hard, if you are allowed to do it in your own way at your own time and you feel it's your choice.

Yes, I did mean Williams's, not Benezet's! Thanks for the reply. I agree that your focus in the essay is that academic skills are not that hard to acquire, rather than that kids in democratic schools do math problems all the time. I do find that teachers these days have a tendency to downplay the amount of control that they exert in their classroom, and so I have a suspicion that Williams was doing that as well, and so I wanted to mention that. It sounds like I would enjoy reading his essay. Is there any source for back issues of "School and Society" online?

It's actually a short article that doesn't say very much beyond what I quoted and presented in the blog post. I don't think it's available online, but if you send me an email by way of my author page here at Psychology Today I can send you a scanned copy of the article. I do agree with you that it is quite likely that Williams had more influence over what was happening than he indicated. Even facial expressions of approval or disapproval might have quite an influence on these boys, especially if they had come to see him as a sort of savior to them--helping them deal with their truancy problems as well as their adjustments in the community. One would also assume that his declaration that he wasn't interested in their academic achievement may not be quite true. He clearly was interested enough in it to test them twice--before and after. Like any researcher, he probably was hoping for some sort of positive, interesting results from these tests, and this may well have influenced his way of interacting with the boys. -Peter

I have no direct knowledge of democractic schools. Yet, I find as an unschooling mother of 5, no lack of plausibility. I see no mention of games, puzzles, or other manipulatives. With only books and chalkboard, the results would be somewhat atypical.

My question is: What is the role of the adult/educator in Self-Directed Education?

Unfortunately I haven't read Free to Learn yet, but I have read "How Children Learn" and "Instead of Education" by John Holt, "Natural Learning and The Natural Curriculum" by Roland Meighan and plenty of other education related books and visited around 30 different schools, groups and learning communities around the world. I have spent much of the last year living in and around Unschooling / Self-Directed Education environments and I have discovered some confusion and different ideas around the role of the parents / adults / educators.

My experiences suggest there is a deeper complexity in terms of the environment that is created (especially including the relationships that are developed) than is often given credit to. I think it would be difficult to recreate the experiments you talk about in this article without more information and experience as an educator.

From the Williams quote: "Whenever a child was found manifesting an interest in some particular thing, opportunity and encouragement were given him to develop that interest..." From this quote, my question is: How is this encouragement given really? What nuances are there in this relationship?

This quote also suggests a deep importance in the nuanced relationship, especially for these particular children... "a personal interest on the part of the supervisor in each child’s home conditions, neighborhood, recreation, health and the like as well as an interest in the child individually may have stimulated the child."

Clearly from this experiment the supervisor/educator had a very important role to play in the situation he organised and the way he related to the children, especially being sensitive and interested in each child's home conditions etc.

So is this purely self-directed education happening here in the Williams experiment? It seems there is a relationship between adult and student, which includes the student exploring interests and this relationship and exploration of interest is very much embedded in a whole experience directed by Williams.

When I read the words from Williams about his experiment, I am reminded of these words from John Dewey in Experience and Education "It is his [the educator's] business to be on the alert to see what attitudes and habitual tendencies are being created. In his direction he must, if he is an educator, be able to judge what attitudes are actually conducive to continued growth and what are detrimental. He must, in addition, have that sympathetic understanding of individuals which gives him an idea of what is actually going on in the minds of those who are learning."

Charlie, I agree that, from the article, one can't know all the ways that Williams himself may have influenced what the boys did. If we take him at his word, he was very interested in them as human beings, very concerned about helping them adjust socially and find placements (or foster care) in the community and overcome their delinquency, but not concerned about their academic achievement. He was apparently surprised that in this situation they spent as much time as they did on academic stuff and that they made such big gains on the achievement tests. It was certainly--unless he's not telling us the whole story--"self-directed." He was not telling them what to do. He claimed that his only direction was that they refrain from bothering others. But perhaps his mere presence and the fact that he seemed to like the boys led the boys to want to please him by doing what they might have assumed he wanted them to do. Self-directed learning is always influenced in many, usually unspecifiable ways by other people--it doesn't occur in isolation of social influences of various sorts. -Peter

Hi Peter, thank you for taking time to engage with this reflection. I think I'm gaining a little more clarity around self-directed education within the broader-deeper social-environmental context. Acknowledging that SDE does not occur in isolation is an important point that perhaps is sometimes missed when there is such a strong focus on the individual, so I'm glad attention was brought to that.

I'm an early childhood educator and I work from home supporting 2-4 year old children to learn in their own time and at their own pace. I recognise interests from observations I make and provide materials and opportunities for each child to explore those interests. I try to keep out of the way and let them make their own discoveries. My oldest child is nearly 18 and in her last year of school. I have watched her love for learning slowly erode over the years until now she has no idea what she loves and wants to persue. Yesterday she made a comment after having some friends over that they were all going to university next year. She said she was just as smart as them but didn't think she'd be smart enough to go herself. I suggested she take a gap year to rediscover herself after all the years school has stolen from her. I suggested she give herself time to unravel her brain that is in knots, full of facts and information that doesn't interest her, and give herself the space to discover what she loves without the assistance of more formal education dictating what she has to learn. I just want her to love learning again. And isn't that what happened in the Williams experiment?

Louise, I think a gap year is a great idea---maybe even a couple of years. I recommend that to anyone who isn't sure of what they want to do in life (which includes nearly all high-school graduates). It provides a break from the grind of study and an opportunity for apprenticeships or internships in a variety of areas to learn a bit about the world outside of school and explore possible career interests. In my college teaching I always found that the most motivated students were those who had taken some time off from school to do something else and had then made a mature decision about college, with some sense of what they wanted to get out of it. Just as one example, I know of one young man who took a gap year after high school and tried various jobs and apprenticeships. He found he liked working in the kitchen of restaurants. He then went on to culinary school and is now a very successful chef. I could imagine someone volunteering or working at a low-level job in a hospital as a way of exploring the possibility of a medical career, before deciding on a pre-med program in college. These are just examples of endless possible ways to use gap years.

Yet another phenomenal article, Dr. Gray. Many thanks for your years of passionate research and the further effort to share this research for the benefit of others. I have long been fascinated with the notion that kids might possess the capacity of teaching themselves, and have even leaned on more than a few of your articles through the last decade to help guide my view of how I might handle the subject of education with my own children. You have undoubtedly empowered thousands of parents like my wife and I (and likely many, many more).

Your article and the subsequent comments reminded me of Sugata Mitra, the Indian doctor who has shown that children are more than capable of learning without the oversight of “expert” adults (aka teachers). His experiences show that self-directed education may, in fact, even be superior to the meddlers’ somewhat recent model of hierarchical, conveyor belt, teacher -> student schooling which makes these meddlers seem a bit callow at best (as it ignores the need for internal drive for a learner to succeed). Mitra’s many experiments certainly show there are tremendous productivity gains to be had if we open our eyes and see beyond what we’ve been told to see by these self-professed guardians of society’s young minds.

I find it fascinating that such radical experiments got to happen in as early times. I would love to learn more about pedagogic trends and views in that period of time if you have more diverse sources.

On the other hand, for me, the 1960s and 70s witnessed a much more intense radical trend in relation to technology. Here are some of my favorite pieces:

1. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society. Book: 1976

2. Neil Postman, Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Book:1969

3. Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall. Song and video clip: 1979

4. Paulo Frere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 1970

5. Fiedel Castro of Cuba actually promised that by 1980 Cuba will be able to dissolve its university since all of life
in Cuba will be an educational experience (Deschooling Society, p. 6 of 50)

6. Add to that Naom Chomsky's critical views of education as a system of indoctrination of the young and how he always announced his thoughts out loud

Those sources have dozens of stories and experiments that you might find relevant to your research.

I'd love to chat more in person if you are interested. I want to hear your hypotheses on why those radical views on education do not usually circulate as widely. I have a few hypotheses on this, too.

Good point, Khalid. If you are curious, I discuss the rise and fall of the free school movement of the 1960s and '70s in my chapter in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. The chapter title is Self-Directed Education--Unschooling and Democratic Schooling. You can find it and read it online by Googling. You will also find in that article references to others' analyses of this movement. --Peter

We are a group of volunteers and opening a new scheme in our community.
Your web site provided us with valuable info to work on. You've
performed a formidable activity and our entire group will be
thankful to you.

Charlie Hoehn suggested I get in touch with you about my research, looking at youth social success at school. As a family therapist I worked with at-risk youth and their families to help youth succeed in school. Success being things like coming to school, turning in work, communicating with necessary parts of the system, etc. Often it was difficult to get parents to join counseling sessions, and the focus became relationship building with the students.

This took on the form of playing basketball, and doing other social play activities as a form of relationship building at school. Teachers and staff had a hard time understanding how playing basketball (a sport most youth I worked with chose to do) would help kids succeed at school. A small informal pilot study showed that youth who played basketball turned in more work at school, came to school, calmed down and made appropriate choices, etc. Overall improvement and motivation to learn/succeed was noted.

This is what has inspired my current dissertation research and I am so encouraged to have been able to connect my passion with yours. Please feel free to contact me to collaborate or if you have further suggestions or comments for me. Thank you, and excited to continue to research a most basic solution, play.

I definitely agree with you, "...school years should be devoted to discovering who you are and what you like to do, to developing skills in what you like to do, to acquiring social and emotional competence, and to gaining the confidence that you can learn whatever you want, on your own initiative, at the time you need to know it."
Great article, thank you for writing it.

Being a student in the 60's in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was a participant in many experimental educational programs. One in particular was very exciting to me. It was a summer day program at a nearby old home that was converted into a science lab of sorts. The home was surrounded by a natural habitat of grassy hills with a stream running though it. We students were allowed to do as we please with the location and the lab. There were some staff around to encourage us and to ask questions of--but they pretty much left us alone. It was nirvana for us! I collected frogs and fish and recreated a pond like mini terrarium in an old 40 gallon aquarium. Finding some food coloring in the kitchen left by the previous tenant, I set about determining which colors attracted or repulsed the fish. Great fun. No one told me "no", I only received encouragement and the occasional question by the staff. It was a sad day when the program ended for the summer.

Say, you didn't happen to meet teacher/author James Herndon during this time did you?
I'm thinking you would surely enjoy his books describing his own "alternative approaches" to teaching during this era, in both Oakland and San Francisco.

Thanks for reporting on these experiments. I only knew of the 8 year study, previously. Most significant about the Williams experiment, for me...the worst boys as we know today are the boys with the highest level of unresolved trauma. I have 5 children, and we all have unresolved trauma. We have enormous pressure from outside influence, and I have no means to pursue the children's interest. So, are gains are small in comparison to this experiment. So yes, the mixed ages, the lack of pressure, and means to pursue interests are the keys. Our public schools have between 30 and 40% children with trauma, in TN. Now, with expanded definition of trauma including shaming and criticism, the numbers would be much higher. And I imagine in inner city schools the numbers are sky high. I am fully convinced that even small slots of time devoted to Self Directed education would help children to heal. I am working on games toward that end. What can be done in the 15 or 20 minutes a teacher can spare? Just discovered this blog. Phenomenal work! I am grateful to you, Dr. Gray.